The appeal of fear

Cancer has been in the news now for over a week, for all the usual reasons.

Normally, some interest group (or charity) is having their annual knees up, calls a conference, and about a month beforehand, they give some bored researcher a ball of notes and the findings of a research project that has never been done. "There are the answers", they tell the researcher as they wave the wad of money under his nose, "Now tweak the numbers to get those results and be a guest speaker at our conference".

The week of the conference itself, their propaganda machine cranks up, and delighted journalists get press releases, commonly known as "my next article" among hacks, from these interest groups. The formula is the same for every conference and press release. The headlines scream, "Something-or-other increases the risk of cancer (or heart disease) by 10,000%".

Everyone’s a winner with this. The conference gets to deliver their lie to the wider population and increase their chances of even more grant money. The journalist gets his 'shock, horror' headline, talk shows get ready made material, and the grateful public gets to buy more fear.

Just why the Irish public has this perverse need to live in fear of everything is not well understood, but the propaganda machine knows it to be true and is happy to stuff the press full of lies for a suitable fee. So, the papers recently ran headlines like "Two big glasses of wine a day triples cancer risk" and "Cancer cases in Ireland could soar by 72%, warn experts". The heat is off smoking now, because as one cynic put it, that has been milked dry for funds. The attention now has switched to the demon drink and all the heart-attacks and different types of cancer you will get if you even pass too close to a pub.

Now, I can understand the propaganda people, they are getting well paid to say what they are told. I understand and even know some lazy journalists and they are merely cogs in the wheel. The conference holders (or experts as they prefer to be known) are only feathering their luxurious beds with their lies and that is a national pastime.

But, what motivates the general public to seek things to be afraid of? Why does the normal average person want so badly to believe a lot of nonsense that is designed to frighten the living daylights out of him? Why do we need to be scared and feel that we, and our families, are living under constant serious threat? Why would anyone willingly buy into obvious propaganda, falsehoods, exaggerations and outright lies?

The big smoking lie is the alleged danger of ETS (passive smoking), and for ages I tried to steer people towards the research itself, which shows clearly that ETS is of little or no harm to non-smokers. This is the self same research that anti-tobacco zealots claim proves the danger. And it took me a long time to realize that decent ordinary people didn't actually want to know the truth. The awful realization finally dawned on me that they wanted to believe the lie, wanted to soak up the propaganda and seemed to need to feel in fear and danger from a harmless wisp of my tobacco smoke.

But then, an old wag of my acquaintance suggested a possible reason to me. "Fear", he said, "makes for good politics". Confidence and independence are the great enemies of fear, so when the free thinking Irish electorate voted against the Lisbon Treaty, democracy was sidelined and they were sent back full of fear to vote again. When everyone knew in their heart and soul that the property bubble could not go on, they preferred to believe the cheerleaders of it, such as the government, the banks, the auctioneers and developers, rather than rely on their own common sense.

He might just have something there. Perhaps when Enda was explaining to our European neighbours that "the Irish went mad", he might have more correctly stated that "the Irish are mad". Could you imagine the reaction in France if he'd told them, "The Irish believe that two big glasses of wine a day triples cancer risk"? Certainly the canny Germans could see how the "Irish brats", having nicked Mom's purse, went mad in the sweetshop and are now on the naughty step of Europe.

Like all bold children, the Irish love their lies!